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The surveillance cameras at a Garland home captured something unexpected: Police officers rummaging through duffel bags, searching a pickup parked in the front driveway and turning a surveillance camera in the back yard.

In early February, the officers were looking for Jon Locke’s brother, Christopher, a convicted felon with an arrest warrant accusing him of fraud. Jon Locke says his brother doesn’t live with him and he and his wife are upset that police officers took it upon themselves to conduct searches on his property without permission.

“I just want an apology,” said Jon Locke, 32.

Joe Harn, a Garland police spokesman, declined to comment, citing the ongoing internal affairs investigation. But a Garland police internal affairs investigator who met with the family told the Locke’s that he did not have a problem with the actions the officers took and also acknowledged that he thought one of the officers had opened an unlocked back door to look into the house.

George Dix, a University of Texas at Austin law professor and authority on criminal procedure, said the actions of the Garland officers appears to run afoul of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment’s protections.

“I continue to think the officers unreasonably searched the vehicle[s] and duffel bags,” Dix said. “The manipulation of and damage to the camera was, in my view, an unreasonable seizure.”

Dix also said he believed that opening the door would likely also be a search and might be reasonable if there was reason to believe a dangerous person inside, “but nothing in the facts suggest this was the case.”